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The Humanities, Digitized
“ If you feel queasy , I can turn this off,” offers Peter Der Manuelian . At the flight controls of a small aircraft, the King professor of Egyptology is following a line of tall palm trees along a causeway that stretches across the Egyptian desert. We’re …
Issue: May-June 2012
Cambridge 02138
Harvard, 375 Years Young At first glance , a 375th anniversary may not seem, as you suggest, as momentous or splashy as a 400th or even a 350th (“ Birthday Greetings ,” September-October, page 5), but it does represent an even three-eighths of a …
Issue: November-December 2011
Cambridge 02138
College Crises In their “Colleges in Crisis” (July-August, page 40), Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn see an outdated and defective “business model” as chief cause of the financial trouble in which U.S. universities find themselves. But 90 …
Issue: September-October 2011
Professor Video
Near the University of Bologna—the world’s oldest, founded in 1088—is a medieval museum displaying carved memorial plaques that honor great professors of the past. “They all show the professor on the podium, with the students below,” says Thomas Forrest …
Issue: November-December 2009
Seriously Funny
In late 1945, when David Frazier, a freshly minted Ph.D. in chemistry, went home to Ohio on leave from the navy, he interviewed for a job with the chemical research department of Standard Oil of Ohio, known as Sohio. He had to take a psychological test …
Issue: September-October 2008
A Spectrum of Disorders
When Alison finally heard her son Matthew’s diagnosis, she had already spent a night on the Web, terrifying herself, as she puts it, “for the rest of my whole life.” At 18 months, Matthew showed a number of the early warning signs of autism: he didn’t …
Issue: January-February 2008
The Science of Happiness
This doesn’t feel like a normal academic conference. True, the three-day Positive Psychology Summit is a sellout, with 425 attendees thronging the meeting rooms in downtown Washington, D.C. But despite the familiar trappings, something seems different. …
Issue: January-February 2007
Reforming Social Security
The current discussion of ways to reform the U.S. Social Security retirement system is becoming increasingly polarized over the issue of "privatization." This divide unfortunately obscures the fact that the views of most Democrats and Republicans on the …
Issue: March-April 2005
Who Built the Pyramids?
The pyramids and the Great Sphinx rise inexplicably from the desert at Giza, relics of a vanished culture. They dwarf the approaching sprawl of modern Cairo, a city of 16 million. The largest pyramid, built for the Pharaoh Khufu around 2530 B.C. and …
Issue: July-August 2003
Harvard Inaugurates President Lawrence S. Bacow
In his 3,600-word address in Tercentenary Theatre on the afternoon of October 5, Harvard’s newly inaugurated twenty-ninth president, Lawrence S. Bacow, powerfully restated, and amplified, the University’s commitments to truth, excellence, and opportunity …
Regional Culinary Specialties—Caribbean & Latin America
An article by Cassandra Lucca, Let’s Go Editor-in-Chief and Danielle Eisenman, Let’s Go Associate Editor Though the burrito is a mainstay of Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine well-known in the US, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean offers other equally …
An Orphaned Sewing Machine
Every object tells a story, and most objects tell many stories. Some can help us transcend boundaries between people, cultures, and academic disciplines to discover crosscurrents in history. Allow me to make that argument by examining a common object, …
A Literary Chameleon
Colson Whitehead ’91 has written a zombie-apocalypse novel, a coming-of-age novel set in the world of the black elite, a satiric allegory following a nomenclature consultant, a sprawling epic tracing the legend of the African American folk hero John …
Issue: September-October 2016
The Pragmatist
At Tufts university , Lawrence S. Bacow famously invited members of the community to join him on early-morning runs: a chance to get a word with the president while training for the Boston Marathon. And so this past April 16—a very wet and miserable …
Issue: September-October 2018
Faculty Air Governance Concerns
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) devoted most of its last meeting of the academic year, on May 7, to an unusual, wide-ranging discussion of FAS and University governance. The subject was introduced as a formal agenda item, docketed in advance of the …